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Mesoporous activated carbon spheres derived from resorcinol-formaldehyde resin with high performance for supercapacitors

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Abstract

Porous electrode materials with large surface area and suitable pore size, as well as short diffusion distance of electrolyte ions in pore channels are desiderated for supercapacitor applications. Herein, we reported the synthesis of mesoporous activated carbon spheres (MACSs) that were obtained by the activation of resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) resin using ZnCl2 as the activating agent. The spherical morphology of MACSs was characterized by scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy observations, and the well-developed mesoporous network (∼2.73 nm), high BET specific surface area (up to 2437.1 m2 g−1), and total pore volume (1.37 cm3 g−1) were obtained by a nitrogen sorption technique. Electrochemical measurements showed the excellent capacitive performance of MACSs and small internal resistance. It presented maximum specific capacitance value of 204 F g−1 for MACS-8 in 2 M KOH aqueous solution at a current density of 0.5 A g−1 and still remained 126 F g−1 at large current density as 20 A g−1, which well met the practical requirements of supercapacitors. Besides, the electrode material also demonstrated prominent long-cycling stability without any capacity loss after 5000 cycles.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from 521 talent project of ZSTU, the program of Graduate Innovation Research in ZSTU (YCX13001), and the project-sponsored by the Scientific Research Foundation (SRF) for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars (ROCS), State Education Ministry (SEM).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, School of Sciences, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, 928 Second Avenue, ** Dong

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  1. Yiliang Wang
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  2. Binbin Chang
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  3. Daxiang Guan
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  4. ** Dong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to ** Dong.

Electronic supplementary material

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ESM 1

The comparison of structure and performance of different porous carbon materials are listed in Table S1 in supplementary data. The comparison of TEM images for MACSs is utilized in Fig. S1. The textural parameters of CS-KOH can be seen in Table S2 and the comparison of electrochemical properties for MACS-8 and CS-KOH (Fig. S2) is also listed. (DOC 5675 kb)

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Wang, Y., Chang, B., Guan, D. et al. Mesoporous activated carbon spheres derived from resorcinol-formaldehyde resin with high performance for supercapacitors. J Solid State Electrochem 19, 1783–1791 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10008-015-2789-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10008-015-2789-8

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